Konfounding
by ChocolateTeapot
Summary: The additional 'k' in magick is more than just an error masquerading as a pretentious way to distinguish between petty tricks and the ability to rewrite reality. A Virtual Adept finds out the hard way. Oneshot


"While we must not underestimate the importance of this reality, tomorrow's battles shall be won in Kyberspace."

She was about to start hammering out the next sentence, but paused. Something about this one just seemed wrong. Rereading it, she quickly spotted the typo. It was a daft one to make really. She was a pretty damn good touch typist and the "C" and "K" were miles apart. Well, mistakes happened, particularly at a median of seventy-two words per minute.

She held down backspace to erase the last word and retyped it. Her brow furrowed as her left index finger hit the "E". Why was "Kyberspace" still there, mocking her? How could she make the same unlikely mistake twice? Perhaps it was time to re-evaluate her typing skills.

"Actually, it's no coincidence, you want this. 'Kyberspace' looks really kool," a treacherous thought whispered. She paused. Looking at the sentence, she agreed. It had a certain style and... She shook herself. What was she thinking? Even if it were to look cool, and it actually looked like something suits would use in the vain hope of appealing to adolescents, a certain measure of standardisation was important. She was a programmer!

She hit the left arrow key a few times and erased the offending letter. Looking down at the keyboard and touching her upper lip with her tongue in concentration, she simultaneously pressed the "C" and the shift key with a certain ceremony. She looked at the screen again, sure to see the problem resolved.

"Damnation and unclosed parentheses!" The "K" just didn't want to go away. She flipped off her computer. This was madness and Sparta quotes were decidedly unappreciated.

Had spellcheck gone bananas? It wasn't marking "Kyberspace" as a mistake, so perhaps the problem lay there. She checked if autocorrect was turned on, but it wasn't.

There still was the possibility that someone had changed her keyboard layout. It didn't seem very likely, but it could be someone's idea of a prank. Didn't Dvorak have a "C" where "K" was on QWERTY? She did know several Adepts who thought it was a much more elegant system... It was a terrible way to advertise of course, but they might not understand that. Quite a few were very insistent that everyone would immediately discover that their way was infinitely superior if people would just give it a try. It obviously wasn't the complete Dvorak layout yet, but perhaps they were attempting to improve the world one changed key at a time.

But she quickly spotted the flaw in her hypothesis. There had been no problems with the "c" in "importance". She glanced at that word again, just in case a "k" had sprouted there since she last looked, but it was completely normal.

She typed a "C" between "in" and "Kyberspace". That too worked fine. She clicked on the space after the "K" and started tapping backspace. But as soon as she erased the separating space, the "C" morphed into a "K".

With a howl of frustration, she pushed her swivel chair away from her desk and stood up. All she wanted to do was write a single word correctly!

Deciding that it would be best to get away from the computer before she completely lost her temper, she walked over to the window and looked out at the rain. The street below was almost deserted, save for a person, their features masked by bulky rain gear, stoically walking their dog. At least the dog seemed to be enjoying itself. She was glad that she didn't have any pets that needed to go out in all weather. Actually, computer mice were all she was willing to endure in that department.

After a few moments of not thinking about the "K", she calmed down again. Well, now she knew that there could be no rational explanation for this. She was a Linux user of course, but not even Microsoft could screw up this badly.

Ruling out mundane occurrences would at least bring her closer to pinpointing the real source.

One possibility was that someone was remotely manipulating her machine. That seemed plausible enough and would almost count as mundane, if it weren't for the fact that in her case it probably wasn't just creepy Sleepers doing it. There were plenty of likely candidates, the Clockwork Convention only being the most obvious. If this was the case, she would have to proceed with extreme caution and perhaps even "accidentally" destroy the computer. It wasn't a Trinary one, so she could face the thought of spilling sticky drink over the motherboard and then trashing it completely while attempting to "repair" it, although it made her skin crawl. But as she watched the raindrops slide down the windowpane, she came up with an objection that could save her computer. Why would such people reveal their presence with something so petty and pointless? It suggested that, if they existed, they were fairly harmless, albeit horribly irritating. Perhaps she'd risk linking up and try to take the fight to them. On the other hand, perhaps they were hoping she would do just that...

Then a far more likely reason for the ridiculous behaviour of her computer occurred to her. Paradox. This just had to be a paradox effect. That also explained why she had that bizarre thought about it looking good.

She supposed she could consider herself lucky that nothing worse had happened. She had faced complete system crashes before, in which all her backups had been mysteriously wiped too, including the documents she had printed out. And she knew of rather worse from her VA contacts. RedCoyote claimed that her computer literally exploded, although she might just have been bragging. Regardless, everyone agreed that there was nothing funny about paradox, except when it happened to other people. NoOne01 was still talking in code three months on and the code in question was _Visual Basic_.

She decided that she'd better take the "K" as an early warning and refrain from X-treme- no, extreme coding for a while.

Come to think of it, out-of-place, annoying "k" were perhaps a very wide-spread paradox manifestation, too common to be noticed as such by most. A staggering number of her fellow Traditionalists were in fact quite proud of being doxed, if their insistence on the spelling of "magick" was any indication. Some of them took pains to pronounce the extra "k". The very worst even used "mystick", a spelling so obnoxious that it hadn't made the Oxford English Dictionary.

She'd had the reasons behind it explained to her before, ranging from an embarrassed mutter that it was an alternate but valid spelling to the pompous insistence that it was part of the fight against the Technocratic paradigm. The most common rational was that it distinguished true magick from common hedge magic. Why they needed a homophone to separate the two was beyond her. It was usually clear from context, and half of them couldn't resist adding "true" every bloody time anyway.

Well, she felt that her explanation was not only better, but left her feeling a lot less exasperated at the spelling's champions. It wasn't exactly a world shattering realisation, but with all the additional "k" floating about, she felt it was significant nonetheless. She decided to write a forum post about it once her own paradox had bled off.

The worst offenders on the "k"-crazy front were doubtlessly the Order of Hermes, who seemingly felt compelled to slip in weird spellings whenever they deigned to use anything but Latin or some other long dead language. They probably spelt that in ways that would make Caesar cringe too. But just perhaps, and only subconsciously, even they realised that they were wrong. Maybe that was why they used "the Art" as synonym. True to character, they had of course picked a pretentious one.

But she didn't have time to muse on the peculiarities of those Merlins. She had a problem to solve and a possible solution had occurred to her. It was not perhaps the most elegant one, but it should be perfectly serviceable. With new determination, she sat down at her computer again.

"While we must not underestimate the importance of this reality, tomorrow's battles shall be won in the Digital Web."

THE END

**I have wanted to write a story about that damn extra 'k' for an age and finally had an idea. I've heard that Revised Mage dropped it, but I had already bought the Second Ed.**

**The etymology of cyberspace is of course "cybernetics" and "space". Strangely enough, "cybernetics" is derived from the Greek word "kubernētēs", "steersman". In some languages, like German, it is actually spelled Kybernetik. So the "k" might not be completely misplaced after all.**


End file.
